This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to selectively providing content in a multi-column or multiple-column display on a social networking system.
In recent years, users of social networking systems have shared their interests and engaged with other users of the social networking systems by sharing photos, real-time status updates, and playing social games. The amount of information gathered from users is staggering—information describing a variety of “newsworthy” items, including recent moves to a new city, graduations, births, engagements, marriages, and the like, as well as more mundane content such as status messages, information about what music has been listened to by users, and recent check-in events at coffee shops. As users become more connected with other users and entities on the social networking system, the number of content items provided to the users increases exponentially. Existing social networking systems have ordered content items in reverse chronological order such that newly published content is displayed first. However, as a result of a flood of content items published on social networking systems, users may be exposed to irrelevant and uninteresting content while missing more relevant content that was previously presented.
Social networking systems may rank content items based on user interests and affinities for other users, but providing a continuous and chronological stream of content to users may effectively obscure more interesting and relevant content items among less interesting content items that have been more recently published. Because users may load a page of a social networking system without reading content items provided on the page, interesting and relevant content items may never be seen by the users. As a result of a decline in the user experience, users may become less engaged with the social networking system.
Specifically, users of social networking systems do not have an effective tool to indicate whether content items have been read or otherwise consumed. Providing users with efficient methods of consuming content items on a social networking system is valuable in providing a better user experience for users. As a result of consumption of content items, highly targeted contextual advertising may further provide valuable advertising revenue to the social networking system. However, existing systems have not provided users with tools or methods of managing the consumption of numerous incoming content items.